A website’s performance is one of the most vital metrics that determine its future prospects for development and promotion. Because poor site performance will literally mean poor assessment of the site from various external services. Therefore, the site will have lower rankings in search, advertising and promotional third-party services, starting from Google Search and Google Ads. And this will obviously do no good to the site, leading only to the loss of potential customers, reputation and money.
But if the site performs well and its indicators are all showing the best result, then it will have the best chances to rise higher in ranks, reputation and audience than its competitors. If you put some effort into it, obviously. Therefore, it is vital for everyone who is dealing with site maintenance to understand what the site’s performance depends on and how to check on the most crucial parameters.
How to Test Website Performance
There is only one proper way to thoroughly test the website to make sure it’s working the way you want it to, and even a little better. You can do it only by setting up a website monitoring routine that will autonomously check on every aspect of the website that is critical for its development and will do everything automatically without human intervention. This routine should include at least site response time checking, overall loading speed testing and server stability monitoring. Also, it will be crucial to keep databases in check if you are working with very complex sites. Like online stores, for example.
And to provide a complex monitoring routine to the site you are working on, will not be enough just to manually check everything from time to time. Obviously, as it was mentioned above, setting up complex monitoring is a must. For example, to achieve the best result you can monitor website status and health with HostTracker’s website status checker and other useful tools available on the platform. Moreover, this service works as a ‘set up and forget’ toolkit. Simply put, once you have done with configuration procedures, you will be able to work on other tasks without the need to check on automated tools.
Moreover, as soon as something happens with the site performance or some incident occurs, the HostTracker system will instantly notify you or the webmaster responsible for the site maintenance. This way you can be at ease as long as you have not received any notifications or alerts. All and all, the less you need to check on monitoring, the better you will understand the importance of keeping the website up and running.
How to Optimize Website Performance
Although for most users each website is a single entity, from the webmaster’s point of view website performance depends on many indicators. And all of them must be kept in check. From monitor server performance and connectivity with Host-Tracker server ping test tool to checking on database stability and even some client-side issues. Therefore, it is critical to understand what to do in case of performance problems with your website and how to optimize it to achieve maximum performance.
- Hosting location and performance. If your hosting is dependable and stable, its subscription includes all your site needs, and the service provides a bandwidth monitoring tool that can be efficient and prevents overload even when the load is high. However, if the server has problems or the network provides bad connectivity, your website may load much slower than you want it to. Also, if the server is too far away from the user, it will cause slow web page loading even when everything else works fine. Although, CDN (Content-Delivery Network) will help in such situations – it will virtually shorten the distance between the server and the user, increasing loading speed.
- Web page size. All web page resources, including its content, code. databases and even built-in services and applications are determining its size. And the higher it is, the longer loading time will be. Therefore, it is crucial to optimize everything so that the web page will load quickly and accurately, without losing in performance, functionality and quality. But you should take balancing between those three things into account.
- Content compression. This is an integral process that must be performed to reduce download times by reducing the size of the files on the site. The most common compression method is GZIP, which compresses files losslessly to make them lighter without sacrificing quality. This allows the user’s browser to download them at a smaller size and then decompress them back to their original size.
- Web page caching. It is crucial to correctly set up caching sequences for web browsers to provide the best experience for the site users. Because when content is cached, browsers will store it locally, therefore decreasing the web page loading time. To put it simply, web browsers will use cached files from local storage instead of downloading everything from the server. But it is vital to understand that frequently updated data should not be cached or browsers will not update them, loading outdated local data instead.
- CSS and JS code. All active CSS and JS inside the web page code will always load before anything else if it was not configured otherwise. Even in situations when it is unneeded. Therefore, it will slow down the web page loading if you will not remove it, set up specific plugins or add defer or async attributes to the web page CSS and JS code.
24×7 Website Monitoring
Site monitoring in itself is a complex task that requires a lot of preparation. Manual tools and software are not fit for this task. Unless you have someone, who will literally work on it 24/7. Or unless you can afford to buy a separate hardware instance just for monitoring purposes. But there is a method that was mentioned earlier – using an automated website monitoring platform. This way, by using the proper tools and setting everything up properly, the monitoring routine will work without interruptions round-the-clock.
If you use website uptime checker on Host-Tracker’s tool and other checks and tests on the same platform, for example, it will work automatically. Therefore, you can literally set everything up and forget about it – this system will send you a notification on its own whenever something happens. And if any troublesome situation occurs, all you need is to look at the monitoring dashboard to briefly determine what happened. And then you just need to look at what the HostTracker toolkit pointed to as the source of the problem and fix it. This way you can react quickly to any incident and correct the situation before it leads to serious losses.
How to Measure KPI for Website Performance
Basically, KPI is a complex measurement of all aspects of the site’s performance. The internal performance part of it includes backend and frontend indicators like overall page loading speed, database performance and site stability. And an external performance part includes various business-related indicators that are dependent on internal performance. Like bounce and conversion rate, traffic and so on, even profits. In other words, development and promotion indicators.
Both of those KPI metrics are vital for a measuring site’s overall performance. Because if internal performance is poor, external will be poor too. And even if there’s nothing wrong with the site in general, without well-working promotion and development, the site will not achieve the success in its niche that you want it to achieve.
FAQs: Website Performance Monitoring Tools
- How do website performance monitoring tools work? Basically, website monitoring tools are checking and testing various aspects of the website on the backend and frontend side. From uptime and page loading speed to server stability and network connectivity. Some of the tools are for one-time use. And some of the tools, like the HostTracker, one of the best monitoring tool kits, are automated and can work round-the-clock. The latter is way more convenient in all regards, especially when you are working with complex websites like online shops, for example.
- What are the different types of web performance monitoring? Taking KPI into account, there are three types of website monitoring. First is the internal frontend and backend monitoring that includes a variety of server-side tests. Second is external monitoring which includes another variety of client-side checks. Third is development and promotion monitoring which includes checks and tests that are literally monitoring the website’s development and promotion results. The latter is not monitoring in a technical sense, because it is closer to statistics gathering, but it still counts, because it’s vital for measuring the website’s performance.
Wrap Up
Website performance is a complex thing that includes a vast variety of metrics and indicators that are vital for user satisfaction as well as for the promotion and development of the website itself. Because if your website is lacking in its overall performance and working slowly and unstably, it will lose in development and promotion performance too. Therefore, it is crucial for you and your business to keep the website in check and maintain its metrics and indicators in good shape.
